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Reinventing Skid Row

At the Pussy & Pooch boutique on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles, the array of bejeweled collars, canine aromatherapy candles and post-modern cat scratchers demonstrates just how good life has become for the privileged pets of the neighborhood. Pussy & Pooch even boasts a Pawbar, providing local Chihuahuas and English bulldogs with the kind of fine dining experience that their owners routinely enjoy at the cafes crowding the avenue. Among the standouts on the Pawbar menu is a plate of fresh raw meats drizzled with gourmet sauce, accompanied by Bowser beer and followed by a dish of Yoghund frozen yogurt. “You live a stylish and progressive lifestyle,” the shop assures visitors to its website, “and your pet companion should too!”

About This Series

A year-long reported series from Politico Magazine, featuring innovative ideas—and how they spread—from cities across the United States at a time of unprecedented urban reinvention.

It wasn’t so long ago that the only dogs and cats in this rapidly reinventing stretch of downtown L.A. were the strays that darted across Main—desperate and without shelter, like the men and women who stumbled on its sidewalks, or squeezed their way beneath accordian gates at night for the relative safety of the garbage-choked entrances to what had once been some of the most opulent office buildings west of the Mississippi.

This is Skid Row, or at least the far western border of it, and for several decades, the only signs of commercial life along this stretch of Main Street were dive bars, grimy convenience stores and gritty “single-room occupancy” hotels, home to the poorest of the city’s poor. Yet today the sidewalks bustle outside shops selling vegan cinnamon ice cream, $50 bottles of Rioja, artisanal cupcakes and those designer products for one’s pooch. Hipsters with beards worthy of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg emerge from lobbies of restored loft buildings where a two-bedroom apartment can go for as much as $3,000 a month. Longtime flophouse hotel residents on federal assistance vouchers now share floors with budget-minded travelers and aspiring artist types still some years away from a luxury loft upgrade. Skid Row, the homeless capital of the United States, is going upscale.

Amid the urban boom of the last decade across the United States, many downtown wastelands have undergone such transformations. The original Skid Row in Seattle—named in the 1860s for the greasy road used by day laborers transporting logs from timber stands above the city and eventually shorthand for a zone of drunkenness and destitution in an otherwise thriving young metropolis—has long since given way to a predictable mix of galleries, smart cafes and pricey lofts. So has the legendarily dissolute Bowery in New York City.

L.A.'s Skid Row was not the first of its kind but may well have become the worst, a 54-block island of despair west of the L.A. river, stretching north from 7th to 3rd streets and east from Main to Alameda, that has long had the distinction of hosting the largest concentration of homeless people in the country. For decades, it was an economic black hole in the middle of the city, where the helpless and hopeless washed up and would remain, very much out of sight and out of mind.

For decades, this was a wasteland, the homeless capital of the USA. Which makes it all the more striking that the march of gentrification, of yoga studios and big real-estate developments, is pushing into the greatest concentration of human misery to be found in all the United States.

Which makes it all the more striking that the march of gentrification, of yoga studios and big real-estate developments and more than 23,000 new residents in just the last seven years, is pushing into the vicinity of soup kitchens, of shelter beds, of sidewalk encampments—of the greatest concentration of human misery to be found in all the United States. That march has brought the inevitable conflicts, as rents rise and worlds intersect, and undoubted benefits, as L.A.'s downtown has suddenly become “a neighborhood as electrifying and gritty as New York in the ’70s,” as GQ called it in a recent travel article that trumpeted its “reoccupation” and declared it well on its way to becoming “a Great City in the heart of the City That Destroyed Cities.”

But perhaps more surprising than this urban hipster upgrade has been another consequence of the vanishing buffer zone between Skid Row and the rest of L.A.: It seems, finally, to be forcing Angelenos to open their eyes to how the city treats its most vulnerable residents.

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Down and Out in the City of Dreams: Portraits of L.A.'s Homeless (Click to view gallery)

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With its endless sprawl, L.A. for decades has been called “the city without a center.” In fact, Los Angeles once did have a center—and it was right where Pussy & Pooch now stands. In the late 1800s, cheap hotels began opening around Central Station to accommodate the thousands of day laborers, fruit pickers and fortune seekers taking the Southern Pacific Railroad to the end of the line. At the border of this transient district, Main Street arose as the city’s hub of power and influence, where its real estate barons, citrus moguls and financiers built Beaux Arts office blocks of granite and marble and bronze with their names chiseled above the front doors. In top-floor executive offices and private clubs, they enjoyed a panoramic view of a city whose future they were shaping. The grandest monument of them all, just a few doors down from today’s Pussy & Pooch, was the Pacific Electric Building, which served as the headquarters for the streetcar magnate Henry Huntington. In its basement was arguably the busiest commuter station in America, the terminus for 1,100 miles of Pacific Electric track leading from L.A.’s mushrooming suburbs to the heart of a city on the move.

In 1914, a produce dealer-cum-self-promoting-preacher named Tom Liddecoat opened the Midnight Mission only a five-minute walk from all this prosperity, serving a 12 a.m. dinner to the crowds of poor and hungry men who had clustered in what he called “Hell’s Half Acre.” By the Great Depression, the area was well on its way to becoming a disaster zone in the center of town, a sketchy neighborhood whose fate was sealed after World War II with the waning of Huntington’s Pacific Electric System. Once the last of L.A.’s streetcar routes was scuttled in 1963, the conquest of the automobile was complete.

By the 1980s, the Gilded Age grand hotels were housing L.A.'s poorest. Above, the transformation of Hotel Rosslyn. | Getty; Mark Peterson/Redux

By the end of the 1980s, L.A.’s banks, corporations and white-shoe law firms had all decamped to a thicket of modern office towers built on a bluff to the west, convenient to one of the busiest freeways in the world. In the ghost town of the old city center, the grand hotels that had once welcomed Charlie Chaplin and Woodrow Wilson were now housing the poorest of L.A.’s poor, and an estimated 30 percent of the neighborhood was living on the streets, sleeping on sidewalks and alleys by the thousands and overwhelming the shelters, soup kitchens and vermin-infested rooming houses that had come to symbolize the neighborhood as much as its Gilded Age splendor ever had.